Monday, August 4, 2014

differs from, say, its extreme opposite, a short term
immediate recollection of, say, yet one more fly among hundreds alighting
on the hide of your horse, in that as a memory it can be recalled life
long, in that it is an event that can be replayed in the mind, even though
it occurred in earliest childhood, and 99 percent of the other flies have
been forgotten, but not this particular horse fly that administered an
unforgettable sting, say, on a child’s nose!

In the instance below, two bombs, twins it appears,
falling and detonating in some woods in May 1940. leaving craters that look
like freshly dug graves, we have an instance where I was able to verify the
first bombings of Bremen, in May 1940, preceded by the RAF dropping
leaflets warning the population of the impending bombing, which came as
retaliation of German bombing of Rotterdam, and of course of these craters
that gradually filled up with detritus from the trees, and one of which
served as an entry to a nearby underground network of badger and fox
tunnels which I started to elaborate into an underground bunker of sorts on
my return to Fir Place in late Fall 1943,
which Fir Place I departed
because the bombings, my caretakers like all caretakers being frightened
for the safety of their children.

A screen memory thus collects a variety of experiences
of all kinds, it is emotionally cathected, danger, a disruption of
normality are its characteristics.

However, screen memories are not pure, like that one
horse fly that just sat down on the horse’s ass and that it’s tail shoed
away. Just another swipe among many.
Screen memories contain distortions that time, memory work introduces, revisions
into the directions of normal expectations, but also revisions in the
directions of prettification.

By age four I had had it appeared a number of
experiences of thunderstorms, part of normal summer at the latitude I lived
in in northern Germany. Thus my recollection of being awoken by the near
simultaneous explosion of two bombs added lightning flashes that I as a
four year old in my four year old’s bed might have seen if they had been
lightning flashes and if I had been awake say around midnight, but the
flashes that the two exploding bombs emitted in woods 100 yards away were
not would not even have been visible if I had stood by the dormer window
something that at age four I would have been unable to look out of. Memory distorted in the
direction of normalization. The glass shards from the broken windows are
recalled as dew drops and the drew drops are assumed to be tear drops –
indeed I may have literally cried, but I certainly was tearful inside upon
leaving Fir Place, not only
because of the Place but also for leaving my mother, possibly the
wire-haired terrier Poetter, and
unhappy at the prospect of traveling with a governess who was already a
hated and feared person. Over-determined unhappiness! The German shepherd Marcommitting suicide is pure
subjective imputation – Mara was terrified, as I may have been too, she was
trying to escape her enclosure and her collar caught accidentally on top of
the fence. A host of consequences from these two bombs made them, made the
event memorable, and the memory was re-inforced by subsequent bombing
experiences and my interest in the two adjacent craters. It may also have
been re-inforced by the preceding, far richer, and more complicated screen
memory of two toy trains colliding head on in a make-believe tunnel the
preceding Christmas - I at least do
not, find myself unable to ascertain these lines of re-inforcement, they
remain unconscious, unconscious fault-lines.

In the instance of the two toy railway engines
colliding inside the tunnel, where my father’s plan had been for them to
pass simultaneously – as a feat of engineering and control – I suspect I
was the only one witnessing this event for whom it then served as the heart
of something I call “catastrophe”. My father grieved a bit, he looked sad,
at his father in law, once again I suspect, throwing a playful wrench into
the proceedings. None of those present could have imagined that my psyche
would make the use it did of this event. In the case of the first bombing
attack on Bremen I suspect that most kids my generation, in Bremen, and in
other cities, everywhere, carry the trauma of the first attack with them,
which may or may not have become over-layed with repeated experiences of
the same kind.

:

SCREEN MEMORY THREE – FIRST BOMBS – AND ITS
FORMATION

We, I, really must imagine someone I
named Gabriel, what appears to be a thoroughly goodified four year old
lying in his child’s bed clutching his toy monkey, Marke Steiff

http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steiff

one of whose ears is moth-eaten or has
Gabriel chewed it off?, there is the sound of airplanes way overhead a brummen, a grumbling sound that is
continuous but not loud enough to wake him or he is too deeply asleep and then
there is a flash and a thunder clap, simultaneous, a nearby explosion –
about 100 yards off - that shakes the ground and the house that shatters
the window glass and that therefore wakes him out of his slumber even
before the dream-work can attribute, accommodate the catastrophic event to
something kinder that might keep him asleep one second longer – a lightning
strike? Well, there was a flash!
However he could not possibly have seen it, not even if he’d been awake and
stood by the window that looked out on the woods, and he would have been
too short at age four to be able to look out, and it is most doubtful that
the flashes of the two near simultaneously exploding bombs would have been
visible through 100 yards of fir trees. However,
lightning and thunder had not shattered the windows to date or shaken the
ground so that it quaked!

I
reared up tossed the Steiff
Monkey, my security, leapt out of his bed and rushed to the window that
looked out on the woods, opened the two window panels, broken shards lying
all around and heard Mara, the
German Shepherd, yowling hysterically in her enclosure, a yowling that
became more and more high pitched and then suddenly ceased, throttled. - That is the screen memory the immedidate
memory of the event.

There is a roar that grumbled away in a
north-westerly direction very much like a fading but oddly continuous
thunderstorm. It
took Gabriel a long time to fall back asleep, hugging his Steiff Monkey, and when I awoke
early, earlier than anyone else, I sneak down the staircase and walk out
onto the veranda and notice that the window glass has shattered and that
shattered glass in the flower heads mingles with the dew and reminds me of
tear drops. It is the month of
May, it is Spring 1940, this has been the first actual air raid on the City
of Bremen.

It appears that I walked out to Mara’s Zwinger [enforcer] enclosure on the
section of the lawn to the right that was not entirely visible from the
veranda, a well-shaded square 100 by 100 foot area which bore the name
“croquet play ground” – and was shocked, frightened by the sight of Mara hanging slack by her collar
from the highest wire of the enclosure. Klinner,
the foreman, came by about the same time and told me that two bombs had
fallen near the riding rink, twins, leaving two craters, like graves he
said, that large and deep, right next to each other, and then Klinner cut
down the dog and carted it away in a wheel barrow. The story went, so
Klinner said, that the British bombers were afraid to actually penetrate
the air-space over Bremen which was defended by dirigibles with razor wire
sharp enough to cut the wing of a bomber, which is why they dropped their
bombs at the outskirts of town. Tales that are then remembered a life time,
certain tales are.

This pretty much approximates my
recollection of what I call my, Gabriel’s “Expulsion from Paradise,” in
Spring 1940 and of the screen memory that formed around it, the inception
of the years of the “Brummer”, the sound of bombers in the sky. Handke
compares the bombers to hornets {Die Hornissen} I to these large
horse flies which also have quite a sting and with which I was far more
familiar from the horse and cow stalls than with the far more dangerous
hornets – if you had asked me what airplane was comparable to a hornet I’d
have said “Jagdflieger,” fighter
planes.

It appears that I was as suicidal-minded
and projected that feeling onto Mara,
who was merely terrified and was accidentally strangled when her collar
caught on the top of the fence,since
I had my own Zwinger, Ms. No, and
was infuriated by then having to leave paradisiacal Fir Place.

As compared to the first screen
memories – the nightmare of the unicorn chasing me up into the Schneise and beyond & of the two
toy locomotives that collide head-on, or mount each other! inside a tunnel
- here I can’t tell whether it is also a perfect memory re-arranged so as
to create a “likely story” - a
secondary revision in time. In this instance I realize that memory has
edited the events, compounded them and rearranged them. The person I must
call Gabriel, since I am indeed dissociated from him not only by time and
space but also by fallible memory, was indeed wakened by two bombs that
fell simultaneously next to each other about 100 yards off in the Fir Place
woods, but lightning strikes and simultaneous thunder derive from other
experience – both earlier and later in life - and signify the shock, not
just of the totality of this experience – the shattered windows, the
“suicidal” dog, the expulsion for Paradise which the bombs elicited - but
of what followed: The several other close calls during bombing attacks,
when the Zoo was bombed in Berlin and the sound of shrieking animals
continues to pursue me, being in the primary school bunker that was half above ground and covered
with sod and looked like a kind of mass grave! Being in the above ground beton bunker during an air
raid while I am having my tonsils cut out at age eight and the bunker as in
a continues earth quake the light of the operating table quavering, the
B-17 whooshing barely over our house and crashing a quarter mile off, the
in fact near continuous grumbling in the sky as of 1943 until late spring
1945 and the forever apprehension at planes overhead and the sound of
sirens of all kinds. My first childish
drawings at age 6 of bombers dropping “sausages” – shit!

However, the flashes of two 500 pound
bombs exploding on the ground one hundred yards away cannot be seen through
100 yards of thick fir forest; perhaps the sound of thunder elicited a
hallucinated lightning flash in Gabriel’s mind? I think memory was doing
its work creating the screen memory.
The terrified hysterical
shepherd indeed strangled herself with her collar at an upper part of the
fence of her enclosure [The Zwinger] but “Enforcer” also referred to
Gabriel’s governess whose orders whose numerous “nos” elicited Gabriel’s
resistance and fury; say, the fury of a stubborn billy goat; the dog’s fury
indeed signifies Gabriel’s near suicidal fury at having to leave paradise
in company of his enforcer, his governess. In other words, the details have
been over-emphasized, over-determined, slightly re-arranged, most likely
why they have been remembered all these years – in lieu of all the
forgotten ones, other less emotionally determined recollections seem not as
accessible. The drops of dew in the flowers,
not just the shattered shards of glass, signify Gabriel’s tears. However,
since Gabriel can be said to have been crying inside since he was taken
from his mother at age nine months, those tears, too, are over-determined.
Loss loss loss. There was a time during the many years that I carried this
book with me that I was going to call it “Irretrievable Losses.” This
commentary in other words, appears to be necessary in telling this event
which elicited hectic activity of the inhabitants of the villa with the
result that within a day my father’s chauffeur and Maybach took Gabriel and
his governess to the St. Magnus suburban station, a four year old sad
little boy and a dowdy spinster. But before Gabriel left his paradise it
appears he may of course have made one more walk, toddle about the forest
as he would several times after during his life.